OK, so I’ll be quite open and say that Paul Sharits is one of our all time heroes, (especially in the context of KYTN) and another of the great artist filmmakers of the 20th Century. He studied music as a child and painting at art school but moved into making films in an attempt to tackle the discontinuities betweens seeing and hearing. Achieving something that approaches musical harmony, or overtones seemed almost impossible in paint, but given the technical use of persistence of vision in film, a lot more achievable. The results are some of the most demanding, exciting and emotionally and conceptually rewarding films of their time.

Shutter Interface is one of Sharits’ great films that approach an idea of musicality visually. It uses the physiology of the eye and persistence of vision to create a visual correlative to harmony and overtone. Two projectors overlap rapidly changing frames of solid colour. As they interact, and as your eye tries to make sense of each frame they either appear to blend, or to furiously vibrate. And it’s this effect that Sharits was aiming for, as it allows the eye to approach something like resonance, to linger on colour after it’s gone, to allow vision to function in a way analogous to hearing.

Shutter Interface is born of an intent to reveal the material substance of cinema in its purest form: spatially. It breaks down film into a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships in a visually overwhelming montage that was intended as “a 3D metaphor of the space of the brain in an epileptic state, brought under control and harmonized.” It’s so much bolder than most films I’ve seen: it’s overwhelming, ambitious, obsessive compulsive, and grand; yet in it’s interest in phenomenology and physiology, (how what we see and hear is transformed from mechanical vibrations, chemical reactions and electrical pulses in the nerves into consciousness), it’s deeply personal and human.